if you get logged out from the server due to being idle, the game thinks you've gone F2P and takes your bars and stuff away (full restart of the game fixes it, but you still have to repopulate your bars I think).

The part about F2P I agree with fully, though the stuff before it grousing about the story (which suddenly sucks now that bashing on TOR's the thing to do) and comparisons to other recent MMOs' story offerings kind of had me rolling my eyes a bit.

The only game that is even comparable to SWTOR in this area is TSW imo, and that's just the writing - the overall narrative/story is better in SWTOR still, imo, not to mention there's a lot more of it (yeah, some of it is silly, and the Superweapon of the Day trope is a bit tired, but what can ya do). MOP and GW2? yeah no, and I say this as someone who doesn't think the GW2 story is too bad.

I'm not sure if they would've been better off just monetizing some of the story content (say... the level 40+ planets, since you have a pretty good hook in the player at that point) instead, LOTRO-style. OTOH the fact that they did not do this is a huge plus in their f2p model for me, so yeah.

I've been dropping in to play my newbie Inq every now and again. I forgot how much I like the story stuff, especially when grouped. I got in the most godawful group on Korriban, three wipes and I'm sure one guy was afk most of the time. Then I solo'd the gold mob that spawns in the open area, got a nice blue saber drop which afk guy 'needed' and got. Dropped that group and promptly ended up in a fully awesome group with another Inq and a SW that just wrecked those 2+ quests, made me remember how much fun grouping can be in this game.

Still not sure how much the f2p stuff will chafe in teh long run, but it's a nice compliment to GW2 and PS2.

Fordel, Sjofn, a 3rd friend, and I are doing a 4 person group through everything (planets, dungeons, story quests as we've all seen the ones we're not playing, etc.) and it's pretty awesome. Social points are through the roof too, we're level 18 and almost done with Coruscant, and I already hit Social 3.

I always thought that it was stupid that they didn't give social points for doing Heroic FP's. Did they ever change that? My sniper has run like a bajillion Heroics and is still social 1.

You get social points for killing (most) champion-tier enemies and for each boss in flashpoints. Heavy flashpointing while leveling will net you about social 3-4, and doing Hard Mode FPs at 50 will rocket you up the Social tiers. Raiding gets you even more Social points. You can also buy social point boosters from the auction house for a song, since every Cartel Pack has a high chance of coming with a bunch.

Just as an example, my Juggernaut tank who only started doing FPs at level 30 when 1.3 hit (bringing with it both the group finder and boosted Social through flashpoints) outstripped the Social ranks of every one of my peers in the raid group - many of whom had been playing since launch - by the time I hit 50. I hit Social X almost two months ago; the rest of my raid started hitting it this week.

Seems like the new covert pilot suit is a huge hit republic side. Even despite that I was able to grab it for about 1.5 mil. The outfits are going to be some big money items once they put in original ones.

I'll try to figure out the name when I get a chance. Basically I just looked at the various 'crafting materials' that I had on hand after opening packs, and checked the prices of everything on the AH. Almost everything is pretty low value except that one and some purple cube thing - the cubes are worth less, and also haven't sold.

About the only things that don't require them are buff stims and augments. Hell, even the new crafted ship parts coming in 1.6 also require them (among a slew of other expensive shit).

The purple Tier 8 crafting mats (the little cubes) go for much less because you tend to use fewer of them; recipes using Stabilizers typically use 4-6 of the things while the Matrices are only needed in batches of 1-2 (and sometimes none). My guild's bank usually hovers between 70-100+ of the Matrices, while Stabilizers are usually in the 0-20 range. You can get maybe about 60 per week if you do all of the raids where they drop* and due to the retarded drop system used for the highest tier of raid gear in Terror From Beyond, everyone needs many of them for item mod crafting.

In case you're curious/don't know, each boss in TFB (even hard mode) drops only one piece of loot per kill in a standard 8-man raid (two pieces in 16-man), compared to two pieces per kill in every other raid in the game - including the newest, Nightmare difficulty Explosive Conflict. The first TFB boss only drops Hazmat gear, which pulls from an item pool with literally hundreds of things in it, the second boss only drops one token for set boots, the third only one glove token. The last two bosses are where it gets stupid: the fourth boss drops only one item like everything else, but he can drop either the offhand token OR the pants, with a 50% chance of each; in nearly two months of killing him weekly, we've seen the pants exactly once. The final boss can drop either the main hand or the chest piece with similar odds of each happening, and we've seen the main hand only once in a month of kills. So not only does the lower amount of loot slow down gearing to a crawl, the random chance on the final two bosses means that loot goes to waste more often than not.

*Four per chest in Explosive Conflict, with three chests and two lockouts in which they drop. Six per chest in Terror From Beyond, with three chests and two lockouts as well. You can also get them via lockboxes with Fleet Comms from doing space missions, but they require a week's worth of grinding space in order to get one raid chest's worth of mats.

I did end up resubbing for a month, but not because of the 'bonus' cartel coins ($1.50 equivalent for a box preorder + 1 month of sub is kinda laughable as an incentive, sorry) or the hotbars (finding 2 hotbars when I logged in was a deterrent, not an inspiration to resub -- but like others have said, they've thankfully gone back on this).

Anyway, game's still decent to play, and the story is second-to-none in MMO land. It kinda scratches a different itch than WOW-MOP (which I unsubbed for now) and GW2 (which I still enjoy a lot, and it doesn't have a monthly sub) for me -- think of it as renting a triple-A single-player game for $15/mo. The 'preferred player' option is WAY too hamstrung to enjoy, imo... and you'll probably end up spending more $ to get the same perks that are built into a sub.